![]() ![]() But I think as I got older… You know, when you’re directing, you’re feeling-at least I do-a lot of the emotions of what the actors are going through, and at the same time there’s this objective eye that is watching and thinking. Well, I wasn’t able to do that when I was younger. Were you always able to stand outside yourself in this way-to talk about yourself as if you’re a character? I was filled with absurd goals like that. The character in the book begins as an angry, somewhat bitter, frightened, uncertain loose cannon, and over time-at least, this is what I was trying to do over time-he becomes a gentler, kinder, and less driven person. I think I’m a radically different person now. Well, I would say many of us change over a lifetime, and mine has been such an extraordinary life that I’ve simply not stayed the same person. Do you feel you have not had a stable, fixed personality through your life, or that when you look back on it, it just naturally forms into chapters? Also, I suppose because I’ve been in the theatre so long, there’s a character who changes in the process. And of course, as you could see from the structure of the book it’s not quite a memoir. ![]() But normally I would have never written a memoir. When FSG approached me, which was sort of an offer, I couldn’t turn down. It’s also partly that there were two things I knew I would never do: Climb Everest and write a memoir. But Louis Malle certainly did a gorgeous job of capturing what we did.Ĭan you tell me a little bit about the title, This Is Not My Memoir ? Are you deflecting, or just being impish? Yeah, it’s a bit like a song where I know how the words go once people start singing it, but I couldn’t tell you how it goes once the song stops, you know? And in spite of that, I could not figure out the structure of the play. I probably saw the production about 200 times. So I’ve probably seen that play more than any other, but yours is still my favorite version of it. I was later in a production, as a servant playing the guitar. The movie’s about as close to the play as you could possibly be. ![]() Did you actually see the play or are you talking about the movie? ROB WEINERT-KENDT: I devoured your book, and I just need to say a real quick fan thing: It was your production of Uncle Vanya that made it my favorite play.ĪNDRÉ GREGORY: Oh, thank you. It is a mark of his thoroughly disarming graciousness that he made me feel that, had we the time, we could have talked all day-even into dinner. Our conversation ranged widely, from the lessons of his peripatetic life to our current moment of global crisis. He has seldom been away from the theatre, or acting roles, since. After making a name for himself with a troupe called the Manhattan Project, whose signature success was 1970’s wild and woolly Alice in Wonderland, he burned out and flailed for years until reemerging as Wallace Shawn’s partner in the famous 1981 film bearing his name. Instead, educated at Harvard and Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio, he set out for a career as a stage director at Philadelphia’s Phoenix Theatre, San Francisco’s Actors Workshop, and Los Angeles’s Inner City Cultural Center. Born in Paris in 1934 to secular Jews from Russia, Gregory grew up in Los Angeles but never took to its native medium, film. The occasion was the imminent publication of his new book with Todd London, This Is Not My Memoir (now pushed to a November release date), which recounts a veritable whirlwind of a life onstage and off. My impressions of André Gregory-as the sage raconteur with the lupine gleam in his eye from My Dinner With André, or the the guru-like director of nearly private yet hugely prestigious theatre productions ( The Designated Mourner, Uncle Vanya ), or even the wild-eyed John the Baptist from Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ -did not prepare me for the lively, congenial phone chat I had with him a few weeks ago. ![]()
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